The goal, acting Office of Management and Budget Director Jeffrey Zients said at a budget briefing Wednesday, is to replace "the indiscriminate cuts of the sequester with balanced deficit reduction so it turns the sequester off."

The problem, of course, is that Republicans aren’t sweating the sequester right now, and there’s little incentive for them to consider more tax increases unless public pressure builds more than it has so far.

Obama’s also calling for universal preschool “in partnership with the states,” following up on the proposal in his State of the Union address.

This idea imagines cash-strapped states are looking for new ways to spend money and the Republican-controlled House is looking to spend on new domestic programs.

Obama is calling for $750 million in discretionary spending, funded by a big increase in the federal tax on cigarettes.Of course, there's no guarantee that a future Congress won't just pull the plug, even if he could get it through this time.

"Obviously, our ability to predict the future is limited," Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said at the budget briefing. But "we believe we've covered the cost of the program the way we've designed it."

Cuts that will never happen

Another favorite budget trick: count savings from cuts that Congress will never approve.

Obama’s proposing a $452 million cut to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, the program that helps needy families heat and cool their homes. He also wants to cut $472 million, compared to his last budget, for EPA's state revolving loan funds for wastewater and drinking water.

He can try, but neither cut is very likely in this Congress — especially LIHEAP, one of the most politically popular social programs in the budget. And environmentally conscious lawmakers would be sure to fight for the EPA funding, too.

Obama’s budget also suggests making a dent in the deficit through almost $38 billion in cuts over a decade for a popular crop insurance program and an end to so-called direct payments to farmers. But farm subsidies aren’t exactly the easiest programs to cut, either, and it won’t be any easier with a Democratic Senate.

Rosy scenarios

The economic outlook is always brightest come budget-drafting season.

Obama's budget doesn't just assume the president and Congress can reach a deal on the sequester — it uses months-old economic forecasts that assume the sequester would have been replaced by now.

"The sequester is a risk to our forecast. No one expected the sequester would stay in place," Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters Wednesday.

Krueger said, for example, that the administration is projecting higher growth in the gross domestic product than it would if the sequester stays in place. But he insisted that "we're still in the ballpark" compared to the Congressional Budget Office and private sector forecasts.

The conservative American Action Forum, however, says the Obama budget not only assumes higher economic growth than CBO, but lower interest rates — 4.2 percent compared to the CBO's 4.7 percent. Those two differences cause "the double budget-whammy of higher tax collections but lower borrowing costs," according to Gordon Gray, the group's director of economic policy.

The budget’s health care spending cuts are spelled out under a section called, “Building on savings in the health care law.” The administration insists that Obamacare will save money, not cost money, because its taxes and Medicare payment cuts will more than pay for the spending on health coverage for the uninsured. And it says the Congressional Budget Office has concluded the law will reduce the deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next two decades.

But remember, the CBO has to assume all of the $716 billion in Medicare payment cuts will actually happen, and that they won’t drive providers out of business — or be reversed by Congress if providers complain. It also has to assume all of the taxes will be collected and that the costs — especially the subsidies to help people buy private health insurance — won’t cost more than the budget office thinks they will.

Republicans have never really believed the official estimates. They think the costs will explode after the first few years. That’s as hard for them to predict as it is for CBO, but if any of the budget office’s educated guesses are wrong, the fiscal picture under Obamacare could change in a hurry.

Having it both ways

Want to slash spending but get more from an agency? Presidents can do it — on paper.

Obama wants to cut NASA’s budget. He also wants to send people to Mars someday. Got it?

His plan would cut NASA’s funding by $50 million, or 0.3 percent. That’s not a lot, but it’s at the same time that he’s trying to develop a new heavy-lift rocket and a new crew vehicle to lift astronauts out of Earth's orbit for the first time since 1972. The goal, his budget says, is a visit to an asteroid in the next decade, “followed eventually by a human mission to Mars.”

At a time when the space shuttle has stopped flying and Americans can’t even get into space without hitching a ride from the Russians, Obama might face a few questions from Congress about how they’re going to get to Mars on the cheap.

Darren Samuelsohn and Jonathan Allen contributed to this report.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 2:36 p.m. on April 10, 2013.